Canadian Peevish Streak Tarnishes National Image

I am Canadian. I’ll say that again, especially for the benefit of any other Canadians reading this. I am Canadian, and I live, most of the time, in Toronto. My partner is American. By a strange coincidence, my ex-partner also happens to be American; strange, because I met my former partner in England and my current one in Canada. But that’s what Americans do, isn’t it? They roam around the globe, being loud and rude and promoting their obnoxious American ways. At least that’s what a lot of my fellow Canadians think, and, oh, how tired I’ve grown of it. I’m tired of a defining part of the Canadian character being a reflexive hatred towards our only contiguous neighbour, and most particularly towards thinking, feeling individuals who leave that nation and, for varying reasons, find themselves in Canada.

Because that’s not the way we, Canadians, like to portray ourselves, is it? On the contrary, we are a nation that glories in our spectacular politeness. It’s a staple of almost every Canadian stand-up routine: some variation on the theme of a Canadian who is, literally or figuratively, steamrollered (frequently by a particularly large and aggressive American steamroller) and who reveals their Canadian-ness by apologizing to the offending driver as he or she flattens them. Ah, how we laugh! We are polite to a fault, so different from those arrogant loudmouths to the south and west (in the post-Palin era, let’s not forget Alaska).

The other day, and for the umpteenth time since I’ve been in a relationship with an American, my partner was gratuitously insulted by a Canadian. The exchange, as usual, went something like this:
“You’re not an American?!”
“Yes, didn’t you know?”
“No. Well, you’re one of the nice ones!” which, no matter how many times I’ve seen this wearying little scene replayed, has yet to have what is presumably the intended effect, to make this rare specimen, the “nice one”, feel in any way welcome.

There is an irony here; I am Canadian, but other people don’t realize it because I sound wrong. Born and educated in Britain, too old to absorb the characteristic diphthongs of southern Ontario by the time I arrived there, I still sound as if I’ve just stepped off the set of Downton Abbey (whether from above or below stairs, I’m not saying). My partner, on the other hand, who grew up in various states and has a hard-to-place American accent, passes easily for Canadian. Not that she’s trying; it’s merely and, since we live in Canada, not unreasonably, assumed; and, while ever it is, she is treated with the courtesy and respect for which we Canadians believe ourselves to be justly lauded. When she magically “becomes” American, two things happen that continue to astonish me. First, her discoverer is surprised; as if the prospect of ever bumping into, in Canada, one of roughly 300 million people who look and sound a lot like many Canadians, but come from the other side of the border, had never entered his or her head. Second, there is the almost invariable compulsion to insult my partner’s entire country while condescending to except the present company.

Let’s try the familiar dialogue again, but this time, for American, substitute Jew. Go ahead, put in Jew and say it out loud. Or imagine that the exchange takes place over the phone and the speakers haven’t seen each other; substitute black, or Asian, or person with [insert disability/red hair/big ears, or anything else the addressee had no hand in selecting]: “No, I didn’t know you were, but you’re one of the nice ones,” i.e., not like the rest of your lot whom, in my polite Canadian way, I have merrily slung into the basket marked contemptible. Polite? Funny? Or likely to cause justified offence?

I don’t know many Canadians who would use any of the substitutions I’ve suggested (I’ve met precisely two, who not only would, but did, express jaw-droppingly racist views in the course of ordinary conversation in the expectation that, being a white woman of European origin, I would share them). But I’ve met plenty, and I’m sure I’ll meet more, who automatically confront Americans in the manner I’ve described and yet, in the very act of doing so, still see themselves as bulwarks of Canadian good manners against a continuously encroaching tide of American boorishness.

So here’s a reminder, for Canadians and anyone else who missed the class in kindergarten:  whenever you disparage someone on the basis of something that they did not choose and cannot change, whether by allusion or directly, it’s rude and it’s hurtful. In the cases of the individual Americans I know and care about, they’re unlikely to tell you so (too polite?) but it hurts them, and me, and Canada’s reputation (don’t think so?--even those clueless Americans are beginning to catch on: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/miranda-frum/canada-polite_b_934220.html). It isn’t justified, no matter how far short you believe American foreign policy, American healthcare, business, gun laws or possibly Lady Gaga fall of their Canadian counterparts. It isn’t polite, and it isn’t Canadian. I am, and in as far as my national identity depends on being snide about my neighbours, I can only, politely, say I’m sorry.

A Is for April; B Is for Boston; Why Is C for Women?

The day before the 2012 Boston Marathon, I went for a training run on the Toronto lake shore. I’m still recovering from a serious injury and was feeling jubilant that I had sustained about 13 km of moderately fast running without pain. I had reached Coronation Park on the return leg of my run when my mood soured. A man walking in the opposite direction had seen me from a distance and felt the need to accompany my approach with a barrage of sexually-based obscenities. As our paths intersected, I had a few choice words for him in return; based on his physical dilapidation, I was confident that I could, if necessary, outrun him.

I didn’t enjoy the confrontation but neither do I enjoy having the C-word applied. I don’t like the one you’re thinking of, and I don't like another one, peculiar, in my experience, to the world of running and endurance sports. As I’ve become a more competitive runner, I realize that I must have “chicked” quite a number of male runners. I didn’t set out to do so, merely to run as fast as I could and pass as many people, of any kind, as possible. But there is for some (mostly, but not exclusively, men), something uniquely humiliating about a female athlete beating a male one, about “being chicked”.

Why this should be so, I don’t know. I don’t know why my lake shore friend had nothing to say to the male runners ahead of and behind me on Sunday night. I do know what it means to run/throw/fight, etc. like a girl, but I don’t know why  “girl” should still be a synonym for incompetence.

Forty-five years ago this month, race director Jock Semple tried to manhandle Kathrine Switzer off the Boston Marathon course. Switzer was Boston’s first official female entrant and while we rightly laud her courage and persistence in completing the race, and the momentum her actions gave to women’s distance running, we should not forget that men helped: Switzer’s coach, Arnie Briggs; Tom Miller, who body-checked Semple to free his then-girlfriend; and not least the dozens of male marathoners who simply, silently kept running.

In tribute to those men, I issue this challenge. To gentlemen, on behalf of the many women who, like me, are sick and tired of being treated like a freak show when we run:

    If I beat you to the finish during training or a race,
    Can you firmly shake my hand, can you look me in the face,
    Can you tell me I was better, not forever, just today,
    Can you keep from hurling insults, in the spirit of fair play?

    If you can, then welcome sportsman, my win is not your shame,
    We can say that I’ve been Switzered, and I’m proud to own the name.

On the Reclassification of the Women's World Marathon Record

Is Lamine Diack's IAAF running a retreat for out-of-work Taliban?  By not only denying women marathon runners in mixed-sex races the right, in the future, to call themselves world-record-holders, but by retrospectively stripping the current world-record-holder of the title that she has rightfully and honourably held for the past eight years, the IAAF is guilty of making a peevish and sexist grab for what it appears to regard as a brand of its own creating: such as we say thou art, so shalt thou be. Meanwhile, the rules concerning male athletes and pacers remain unchanged: pacing, according to the IAAF, is acceptable as long as it is done by a person of the same sex.

Why? By using elite male athletes as pacers, world-class women marathoners may (but are not guaranteed to) run faster than they would alone. By pacing off men in the 2003 London Marathon, Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain propelled women's marathon running into a new era when she set the current world record (or "world's best", as it appears we must now call it) of 2:15:25. Refusing to acknowledge this time as the world record is, first of all, a logical absurdity and oligarchic double-speak of the highest order. It may look like a duck and quack like a duck, but the IAAF, bestower of Brand Duck, reserves the right to call it a non-duck. Secondly, and more disturbingly, it actively penalizes women who seek to stretch the boundaries of female athletic performance. It is a physiological fact that elite men will always be faster than elite women; no female marathon runner will ever be the fastest human over the distance; but that is an advantage to men, not to women.

Stretching credulity to support discreditable decisions, has, however, become something of a minor sport under Mr. Diack. In 2009, the IAAF instigated the bizarre and revolting Caster Semenya affair, which resulted in the uncommonly fast, but insufficiently-kittenish, South African being subjected to the kind of prurient public speculation that would have gone down well in seventeenth-century Salem. Prior to that, in 2007, the IAAF located a lab willing to tell a gullible media that Oscar Pistorius, a double-leg amputee, had an advantage over two-legged men in the 400 metres (a decision subsequently overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which found no evidence to support the IAAF's ban on Pistorius competing with able-bodied athletes).

The latest decision of the IAAF is, like others in recent history, wrong, and should be reversed. Furthermore, it prompts the question, in a sport still all-too-frequently tarnished by drug abuse, has Mr. Diack and his organization really so little to do that removing world records from people in whose achievements the IAAF has previously gloried is a priority? If so, it is time for Mr. Diack to vacate his office, and hand the job of administering athletics to people who do not feel, as he and his fellow gnomes of Monaco seem to do, a pressing need to try to return the sport to the days when the length of men's shorts came close to exceeding the distances women, for their "health", were permitted to run.